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Sacrifice?
Given the wrapped state of the body, the person inside it wasn’t having a great day and most likely hadn’t come here of their choosing.
And kidnapping? Totally a felony.
Which meant, as an officer of the law—sort of—this was something I had every legal right to intervene on.
First things first though, I wanted to catch them in the act of trying to open the gate. If we could show that this ritual was apocalyptic in scale, then my scope of work went from arresting them to immediately killing them.
Yup, as gross as it sounded, after the events in New York, new laws had been made providing certain people with carte blanche to execute anyone demonstrating intent to end the world.
I had to be able to prove that intent before I could do anything, which meant waiting until they were at least partway into their ritual. If I could stop things right before they got to their sacrifice, I’d be able to save the would-be victim and put an end to their shenanigans in one fell swoop.
If everything went right.
Which was asking a lot.
Seemi
ngly satisfied with their charcoal line work, the figures all found their locations on the exterior of the circle, each standing at a point of the pentagram just as Harold had said they would.
They clasped hands and began to chant in unison. I should have taken the time to learn some Latin, since I’d heard so much of it in my line of work. But whatever they were saying didn’t sound like any Latin I had ever heard, so it was all gibberish to me.
Harold must have realized I was perplexed because he said, “It’s Enochian.”
“Huh?”
“They’re speaking Enochian.”
“Good Lord, another stupid, archaic language I don’t know how to speak? Can’t everyone just be considerate and learn English?”
“Enochian is older. Perhaps you humans should learn that instead of expecting us to learn your idiotic mutt language.”
Burn.
We settled back into silence as the chanting grew louder. The flames of the candles guttered then got impossibly tall, easily a foot or more high. The charcoal lines in the ground began to smoke. I pulled out my phone and started recording everything. This should be plenty of evidence to show the figures had been up to no good.
Their voices were a mix of masculine and feminine, so I had a sense that this was a gender-diverse group. How progressive. Two of them dropped hands with the rest of the circle and moved to collect the bundled sacrifice.
If they were speaking a language I understood, I might have been better able to guess what they were up to, or what part of the ceremony they were at, but frankly I was at a total loss.
I had to hope a dead-languages scholar could back me up by figuring out what they were saying in the clip.
I could ask Harold for a translation now, but it seemed like neither the time nor the place.
The charcoal lines smoked more, filling the alley with a faint white cloud. The two figures had dragged the bundle into the center of the circle and were cutting the bindings free. When they were done, they unwrapped the body of a small man, who was unconscious, and left him in the middle of their ceremonial space. After they put the cloth and ropes outside the circle, the two cloaked figures rejoined the group, and all six resumed chanting.
It was hard to make out precisely what was going on, with the smoke getting thicker and the light from the moon overhead making it opaque enough to create a natural curtain. I put my phone back in my pocket as there wasn’t much benefit in filming anything anymore, since it was just white and muddled.
I pulled my gun out of its shoulder holster and checked the magazine. Loaded full up with silver bullets.
If all six of these cloaked figures were vampires, they wouldn’t be killed by silver, but it would certainly slow them down. At the point this turned to violence, I’d have to call in my backup. I could take on six full-blooded vamps on my own, but the last time I did it, I ended up with my arm broken in several places.
I was supposed to fly back to New York next week for a long-awaited reunion with my hubby, so I’d much rather not have any broken limbs at the time. If you know what I mean.
“Echo to Alpha,” I said.
“Alpha reading, go ahead, Echo,” came the voice in my earpiece.
